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'Without CPR training my husband wouldn't be here'

Two people, Kat and Adam standing smiling in a garden. She wears a summer flowery dress and has blonde hair. he has brown hair and a beard and wears white trousers, a stripy shirt and sunglasses.Adam Dodd and Kat Dodd

Georgie Docker

North West

The wife of a former Manchester United footballer spoke of the "awful" moment she woke up in the middle of the night to find him "gargling" in the midst of a heart attack.

Kat Dodd, 34, performed 16 minutes of CPR on husband and footballer Adam Dodd, 32, after she woke to him having a heart attack, on 4 June 2022. Her knowledge of first aid saved her husband's life.

The couple have teamed up with the British Heart Foundation this Christmas to encourage others to become CPR trained.

"Without CPR training Adam wouldn't be here and it would be a very different life that we're living," Ms Dodd told Radio Manchester. "It was really important and lucky that I knew what I was doing," she said.

Describing the incident, Mr Dodd told Radio Manchester earlier, "It was just a normal day" and the couple had eaten a takeaway and gone to bed.

She said she was awoken at about two or three o'clock that morning by a noise coming from Adam.

"When I turned to look at him, I noticed that he'd completely gone black," Ms Dodd said.

"He had no blood running through his body anymore. And the sound he was making, it was like almost like a gargle.

"They call it agonising breathing, which is your body's last gasps."

A man with short brown hair and a brown beard poses in red football kit against a black backdrop.Sky Bet

Ms Dodd said she called an ambulance immediately and began CPR for 16 minutes until the vehicle arrived.

"It was awful because obviously I was just screaming out loud 'you can't die', 'you can't leave me'," she said.

"But also, I was trying to perform CPR to the best of my ability, trying to save his life. It was a long 16 minutes."

Mr Dodd woke up in hospital days later after being in an induced coma in intensive care.

More than two years on, he is back playing football for Bamber Bridge and now lives with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which protects him from life-threatening heart rhythms.

'Lucky ones'

Mrs Dodd said she was "one of the lucky ones", because she had been first aid trained in her job as a primary school teacher.

"I never ever thought I'd have to use it, especially not on my husband," she said.

"Performing CPR gives people the best chance for when the medical professionals do get there, and that is why we're really really proud to be part of this campaign to promote people to learn CPR."

According to The British Heart Foundation, more than 40,000 people a year have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the UK, and fewer than 10% survive.

But giving CPR promptly and using a defibrillator can more than double someone's chance of survival.

Mr and Mrs Dodd are now encouraging others to become first aid trained - and raising awareness of The British Heart Foundation's free, interactive, online CPR training course, RevivR.

Completing the course takes 15 minutes, and promises to teach participants how to recognise and react to a cardiac arrest.

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